[Ppnews] Attorney Robert Bartle on withheld evidence by FBI in Omaha Two case

[Political Prisoner News]

Attorney Robert Bartle on withheld evidence by FBI in Omaha Two case

    * October 12th, 2010 11:23 am ET
    * By 
<http://www.examiner.com/user-richardsonreports>Michael 
Richardson, COINTELPRO Examiner
Robert Bartle, a Lincoln, Nebraska attorney, 
represents Ed Poindexter, an imprisoned Black 
Panther leader, in his effort to gain a new 
trial.  Convicted in 1971 for the bombing murder 
of an Omaha policeman, Poindexter is serving a 
life sentence at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.

Poindexter was charged along with Mondo we Langa 
(formerly David Rice) for the August 1970 murder 
of Larry Minard who was responding to a 911 call 
at a vacant house.  During their 40 years of 
imprisonment the pair have become known as the 
Omaha Two and are considered political prisoners by many.

Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa were targets of 
J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal 
Bureau of Investigation, and the focus of 
COINTELPRO subterfuge because of their role as 
leaders of the National Committee to Combat 
Fascism.  The NCCF group was a Black Panther 
affiliate and vocal critics of the police in Omaha.

The clandestine Operation COINTELPRO was Hoover’s 
secret war on domestic political “enemies” and 
the Black Panthers were at the center of 
attention.  Hoover had ordered Paul Young, the 
Special Agent-in-Charge of the Omaha FBI office 
to get the two leaders off the streets.

Hoover had nagged Young since December of 1969 to 
produce results and had required the Omaha office 
to submit reports every two weeks on their 
progress toward eliminating the Omaha Two as a 
political force in the Midwestern city.  When 
Larry Minard was killed the opportunity presented 
itself to blame the two Panther leaders.

However, one sticky detail threatened to derail 
the COINTELPRO plan to frame the two leaders, the voice of the killer.

Minard was lured to a vacant house by an 
anonymous 911 caller where a bomb waited.  The 
Omaha Police made a recording of the call 
capturing the voice of Minard’s killer.  Young 
needed to get the 911 tape out of the way to 
build a case against the Omaha Two.  The day of 
the bombing, Young conferred with Glen Gates, the 
top police official in charge of the case and 
offered to analyze the tape at the national FBI 
crime laboratory--but not issue a report on the identity of the killer,

Hoover approved of the plan to let Minard’s 
killer get away with murder and Hoover’s order 
was noted by Ivan Willard Conrad, the FBI crime 
lab director, in a handwritten entry on the 
COINTELPRO memo  .Robert Bartle talks about the 
significance of Hoover’s influence on the case.

“The whole COINTELPRO operation under the late J. 
Edgar Hoover’s administration was unknown to the 
folks at the time.  The whole COINTELPRO focus on 
Ed and Mondo
and the efforts to discredit them in 
the Omaha community were a separate 
conspiratorial operation that was not known to either Ed or Mondo.”

“The fact that the tape was withheld from the 
defense at the time and the fact that the FBI, 
under the auspices of the COINTEPRO program, 
first offering to do a voice analysis and then 
retreated from that position because it might 
“prejudice the prosecution”  we believe is 
critical information
that would have likely led to an acquittal in this case.”

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMcEilwCDyw>YouTube 
interview with Robert Bartle


Permission granted to reprint.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/ppnews_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20101012/af38b12f/attachment.htm>